“How dare you say I pry and spy!  You know it is not true, Anna.  I only came to ask you to play with us, and—­and how was I to know that you were doing something that you didn’t want any one to see?  Why don’t you want any one to see you?  What are you burning?” Betty stepped nearer and looked more closely.  “O Anna, it is your clothes that you are burning.  Oh, how did it happen?  You didn’t do it on purpose, did you?”

“It doesn’t matter to you how it happened.  If you don’t want to wear things you hate, you just go and tell tales to your father.  You can get everything you want.  But I haven’t any one to stick up for me, and I’ve got to do things for myself.”

“Then you set this on fire on purpose!  Oh, how wicked; and they cost such a lot too!  I wonder you aren’t afraid to be so wicked!” cried Betty indignantly.

“I don’t care,” said Anna, trying to put on a bold front.  “I never did want the things, and I never shall.  I should die if I went about much longer a perfect mountain of clothes.  How would you like to wear a ‘hug-me-tight’ under a serge coat in this weather?”

“Not at all.  But what shall you say to Aunt Pike?”

“I shan’t say anything; but I suppose you will,” sneered Anna.  “I do wish you wouldn’t be always poking and prying about where you are not wanted.  You might know that people like to be left alone sometimes.”

“I am sure,” cried Betty, quite losing her temper at that, “I would leave you quite alone always, if I could; and I am not a sneak, and that you know.  It would have been better for Kitty if I had been.  I don’t know how you can say such things as you do, Anna, when you know what we have had to bear for you.  I suppose you think I don’t know that it was you who should have been sent away from Miss Richards’s, and not Kitty!  But I do know—­I have known it all the time, though Kitty wouldn’t tell me—­and I think that you and Lettice Kitson are the two meanest, wickedest girls in all the world to let Kitty bear the blame all this time and never clear her.  But after this—­”

“Betty!” Aunt Pike’s voice rose almost to a scream to get above the torrent of Betty’s indignation.  “How dare you speak to Anna so!  How dare you say such shocking things!  You dreadful, naughty child, you are in such a passion you don’t know what you are saying, and you are making Anna quite ill!  Look at her, poor child!—­Anna dear, come to me; you look almost fainting, and I really don’t wonder.”

Anna was certainly ghastly white, and trembling uncontrollably, but as much at the sight of her mother as from Betty’s fiery onslaught.  “Yes—­I do feel faint,” she gasped, but she was able to walk quickly to her mother’s side, and to lead her at a brisk step away from that smouldering heap on the ground.

“Poor child, I will take you to your room.  You must lie down and keep very quiet for a time.—­Elizabeth, follow us, please, and wait for me in the dining-room.  I will come and speak to you there when I have seen to Anna.  In the meantime try to calm yourself, and prepare to apologize for the dreadful things I heard you saying.”